Field of the Disclosure
The disclosure relates to content provisioning, distribution, transmission, and delivery, and, in one aspect, to a device, system and method to allot broadcast and narrowcast for audiovisual communications.
Description of the Background
In a distribution network, numerous discrete, preassigned groups of users, typically referred to as population pools, may interact with content. Each user may receive content that is received by all users, by users of multiple population pools, and may additionally receive, or have available for request, content available for use uniquely by that user, or uniquely by a subset of users, or uniquely by one or certain population pools, at any given time.
Broadcast content, as would be understood to those skilled in the pertinent arts, is content that may be constantly transmitted or otherwise made available to many or all users.
Narrowcast content, such as switched digital video (SDV) and video on demand (VOD) technologies, enables content and network providers to offer a wider variety of content and programming. In a SDV system, for example, unwatched or rarely watched content may be transmitted to particular population pool or pools, and/or to the users, and/or at the times that the content is requested.
Current solutions for assigning or allocating content to broadcast and/or narrowcast distribution models fail to adequately address conditional relationships. More specifically, the selection of a particular content item or channel may be a function of not only conditional relationships with other content items or channels, but also of the overall content or channel lineup of which that particular content item or channel is a part. In other words, for example, that particular content item or channel may be selected more or less frequently dependent upon the presence and content of other content items or channels in the same lineup.
Even with the use of bandwidth management, in order to achieve the highest bandwidth savings it is imperative that a lineup result in the lowest demand on the content distribution system, particularly at peak times. In order to optimize the demand, optimal ranking algorithms are often employed. Such optimal ranking methodologies presently include, for example, ranking based on an overall time of viewing or time of viewing at peak intervals. In these ranking algorithms, the time that a particular content item or channel is selected, or otherwise active, may be rank ordered against all other content items or channels, and a lineup may be chosen by selecting the least popular content items or channels until bandwidth constraints are reached.